Image taken from "What miscegenation is! : and what we are to expect now that Mr. Lincoln is re-elected." by L. Seaman, 1865. Source: archive.org

Love Off Limits

A History of the Relationships Once Considered Taboo in America

02.15.19

In this episode, Joanne, Brian, and Nathan discuss stories of love that challenged social norms and transcended class, race, and gender. They explore how people subverted laws banning interracial marriage, and why a wave of heiresses running away with their coachmen caused a moral panic in the Gilded Age.

Funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and BackStory, change the narrative of race and representation.

romance; social norms

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Segments

Defiant Brides

Joanne talks with writer Nancy Rubin Stuart about two Revolutionary-era women whose choice of romantic partner put them at odds with their family and country.

American Revolution; Loyalists; Patriots (American Revolution); loyalty; romance

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians along with our colleague, Ed Ayers, and each week we explore a different aspect of American history.

Joanne: I want to take you to Boston Common in August of 1773 when a young woman named Lucy Flucker sets eyes on a young man who’s going to change her life.

Nancy: She’s not quite 18 when she meets him and he is drilling on probably the Boston Common with this militia and she’s struck by how handsome he is. He’s tall, he’s handsome. She gets to know him, he’s a book-binder. He’d been sort of orphaned at a young age. He had to drop out of Boston Latin School. He’s brilliant and he studies all these books he’d brought over from England. He sells these books, he has a flourishing book store in Cornhill in Boston. People like John Adams and Samuel Green come and read these books so he has this flourishing little business but she’s completely bowled over by him and he is by her. Lucy, sparkling dark eyes, high color, vivacious, and he was madly in love with her.

Joanne: That’s Nancy Ruben Stuart. She’s written about Lucy Flucker and Peggy Shippen, two revolutionary era women whose choice of romantic partner played out against the turbulent politics of the day.

Joanne: Peggy married Benedict Arnold who would turn his allegiance from George Washington’s forces to the British, and Lucy’s choice, the bookseller Henry Knox, put her socially and politically at odds with her parents.

Nancy: Her father was a royal appointed secretary of the province of Massachusetts. Her mother was the heiress to the Waldo Patent. Waldo Patent owned a huge tract of land in Maine. They were high born and they lived very elegantly and she’s gonna marry this bookbinder?

Joanne: So she’s a woman who knew her mind. Knew that she loved him, knew that she wanted him, but then what about Henry’s politics?

Nancy: Well, you know, this is 1774 and things were heating up between the Americans and the British and more and more he’s embroiled in the politics and her family is alarmed. What’s gonna happen? But she doesn’t care and she gets married. They don’t come to the wedding. She lives with him, we don’t know exactly where, but then she just is with him all the time as much as she can. She follows him, eventually, through the army camps of the Revolution.

Joanne: Wow. Did she ever reconcile with her family?

Nancy: No, it’s a sad part of the story because when she gets married to Henry and she moves in with him and she eventually, once the war breaks out, she has to live with people that are well below her quote social status in makeshift homes and so on, almost you would say shelters but she tries to write to her parents and the letters are never answered. When the British evacuate Boston, she hears that her father, who of course was the secretary, is transported by the British back to London. Her mother ends up in Halifax, Quebec and there’s a little correspondence with her sister about that and many years later, well after the Revolution, there is correspondence with her mother and her father but mostly her mother in London but then her parents die so she never sees them again after the Revolution is broken out.

Joanne: Wow. Really does give you a sense of what that decision was, what a powerful decision that was.

Joanne: And so let’s switch to decision number two. Tell us a little bit about Peggy Shippen and how she ended up meeting Benedict Arnold.

Nancy: Think about Peggy Shippen like a china doll, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, petite, innocent-looking. Skilled in the usual things a belle would be skilled in, you know, dancing, needlework, maybe some French but she was the brightest of Judge Shippen’s daughters and also his favorite so what happens is that because Judge Shippen’s a neutralist, when the British occupy Philadelphia, he’s entertaining them. When the British finally leave Philadelphia, and the Patriots come back in, he’s buddy-buddy with them. He sort of plays both ends so Benedict Arnold’s now the commandant and all seems to be well. He’s keeping the civil peace, he’s friendly with both of the people who were on the Torie side and are the Patriots. He plays both ends and he looks pretty good. Yes, he’s 20 years older, yes he’s crippled, yes he has children from his first marriage, but he looks pretty important. He’s now been made a general. Judge Shippen’s no fool, he checks him out. He gets character references. He still has kind of doubts. There’s some sleazy stuff that Arnold did with trading and so on, not great, but on the other hand, the guy’s sort of at the top of his form and he’s important and he’s respected by the army.

Nancy: And Peggy is insistent and so she marries him in 1779 but as I say, within a month, although nobody knows it for another year, year, year and a half, he’s already beginning to spy on the Americans and give out trade and weapon secrets and so on.

Joanne: Let me ask you a totally different kind of question, a more of a historian-esque kind of a question and less of the 18th century kind of question ’cause I’m just very curious. As a woman now looking back and going through this research, what was it that really struck you when you first started getting these two women’s sense of what they were doing? What grabbed you immediately when you started doing that research?

Nancy: Well I think that their strong desire to do what they wanted to do is what fascinated me. I don’t think, though, that either of them knew what they were really getting into.

Joanne: Well, no, none of us does.

Nancy: Nobody ever does.

Joanne: Really. No.

Nancy: Yeah couple things on that. Peggy Shippen who always used to say in the beginning her husband was the best of husbands, that Arnold was the best of husbands, later in life when one of her relatives is getting married, she’s in England, she writes back to her father and she says, well marriage is but a lottery.

Joanne: Nancy Ruben Stuart is the author of Defiant Brides: the Untold Story of Two Revolutionary Era Women and the Radical Men they Married.

Malays, Not Mongolians

For centuries, dozens of states implemented anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting people of color from marrying whites. While the overarching reason behind the laws were to control the color line, the details of each statute depended on a state’s geography and racial makeup. Nathan talks with scholar Rachel Moran about the 1933 case Roldan v Los Angeles County and how Filipinos living in California were able to fight for their right to marry across racial lines.

Music:

Elipse by Podington Bear

Sincerely Yours by Podington Bear

Filipino Americans; anti-miscegenation; color; intermarriage; race

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian: Today on the show, we’re gonna explore stories of love and romance that transcend class, race, and gender.

Joanne: We’ll discuss how female blue singers expressed a black queer identity in the 1920s.

Nathan: We’ll hear about how some people circumvented laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

Brian: And, we’ll also learn about a moral panic that gripped wealthy families in the Gilded Age.

Nathan: In 1932, Salvador Roldan walked into the county clerk’s office in Los Angeles and asked for a marriage license. He and his fiancee, Marjorie Rogers, wanted to get married but there was a problem.

Rachel: They went to the registrar and they were denied a license.

Nathan: That’s scholar Rachel Moran.

Rachel: There had been an opinion by the state attorney general saying that the anti-miscegenation law barred Filipinos from marrying whites because they were Mongolian.

Nathan: Roldan was a Filipino man and Rogers, a white woman. So, according to California’s anti-miscegenation law, that meant they couldn’t marry.

Rachel: Anti-miscegenation laws were statutes that prohibited marriage across racial lines and so, for example, 38 states at various times had anti-miscegenation laws so they were not just in the South. They also weren’t just for blacks and whites. Many people think only black-white relationships were regulated but 14 states regulated intermarriage with Asians, and 7 states intermarriage with Native Americans. There’s a 300 year history, give or take, of anti-miscegenation laws in the United States.

Nathan: Moran says state governments regulated interracial marriage for many reasons. Of course the overarching reason was to control the color line but the details of each statute varied according to a state’s geography and racial make up.

Rachel: So when you look at the South, you see black slaves working along white indentured servants and there’s a deep concern that if there are relationships, it’s going to muddy the line between black and white and slave and free and in the West, where later you saw regulation with Asians, there was again this concern that Asians might intermarry, become attached to the United States, want to remain in this United States rather than just being temporary laborers and so anti-miscegenation laws became a way to keep a low wage labor force in tact, isolate, treated as un-assimilible, and ineligible for citizenship.

Nathan: But for Filipinos like Roldan, living in California in the 1930s was a bit different.

Rachel: Well what’s so interesting about the Filipino experience in California was an overwhelmingly male migration to do work but they were considered American nationals because the Philippines had become and American territory. They had been taught in American flag schools so they were steeped in the belief in American democracy, the rights of the individual, and the freedom and equality that would define us as an authentic democracy. So when they arrived, for example in Los Angeles, they felt free to go to dance halls to socialize with white women, Mexican women, and basically have relationships and they didn’t think this was any problem. So when there was push back, for example there were riots, the Filipino community mobilized in a way that other communities did not. They hired lawyers to litigate the denial of marriage licenses and when they defended themselves, they said we were taught that we were American and therefore we have the same rights as any other American.

Nathan: So when the registrar denied Roldan and Rogers, the couple decided to do something about it.

Rachel: They didn’t give up! They didn’t say, oh well then, we won’t get married. Instead they decided to fight it and they benefited from the mobilization of the Filipino community around this effort.

Nathan: And with the help of the Filipino community, Roldan and Rogers took the case to court. But their lawyer didn’t actually challenge the constitutionality of California’s anti-miscegenation law. Now, according to California’s law, Mongolians couldn’t marry whites.

Rachel: At the time there’s an anthropological account of race and I think the categories are treated as monolithic and so the idea that these categories are separate and distinct and therefore have to be all enumerated in order to be covered, is one of the reasons the Filipino community is actually able to challenge the law because the attorney general basically says common sense tells me that the legislature intended when it used the classification Mongolian, to include Filipinos.

Nathan: But the lawyer said according to the scientific racial categories that influence the anti-miscegenation law in the first place, Filipinos weren’t actually Mongolian. They’re Malay.

Rachel: And so they used that scientific authority to undercut the attorney general’s sense that of course the legislature wanted to include Filipinos. So what they’re basically saying is it’s not an exception, the legislature didn’t cover us so we’re not prohibited unless the legislature explicitly says so using the scientific racial category that applies to us which is Malay. You can’t say that all Asians are Mongolian, right? You have to use our category because the legislature chose to use Mongolian and that doesn’t include Filipinos. We’re not within that racial category. And in a sense they’re saying if you really wanna exclude us from marrying, you need to say it explicitly on the face of the statute.

Nathan: Roldan and Rogers won their case and obtained a marriage license. The ruling was upheld and Filipinos were legally classified as Malays but three days after the California Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, the state legislature struck back.

Rachel: Within three days of the decision’s upholding this interpretation, the state legislature amends the statute and includes Malays as one of the categories. It happened very quickly. Today we think that legislatures can’t get anything done, they’re in gridlock, they’re paralyzed, but at that time they could move pretty quickly and they did.

Nathan: Now even though Roldan and Rogers were married, their union was seen as illegal in the eyes of the law.

Nathan: But the story doesn’t quite stop there.

Rachel: Yes, it’s very interesting because the Filipino community doesn’t say alright, we lost before the California legislature, we’re done. No, one thing they did was continue to marry particularly Mexican women who had a similar appearance in terms of their color and so registrars didn’t challenge these marriages because the Mexican women were not seen as authentically white and therefore they were permissible even though as a formal matter by law they were white. The other thing that Filipino men did was to go with their white brides to another state like Utah, for example, and they would marry there where there were no restrictions and when they came back, California gave full faith and credit to those marriages and so they said well, we have a legitimate marriage license and you honor those marriage licenses so we’re married in the eyes of the law.

Nathan: So this is the case form 1933 and it isn’t until Loving v. Virginia, 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws around the country are ultimately struck down. But what’s happening in this three decade period between the case in California and what becomes the Loving decision?

Rachel: Well you know what’s very interesting is that California’s Supreme Court became the first state high court sensory construction to strike down anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional but no other court followed suite. Some legislatures started to get rid of these laws on their own, annulling them, but the laws remained intact, particularly in the South, until 1967 and there were a couple of challenges before then but the court didn’t want to engage, for example, there’s a case involving a Chinese Seaman in the 1950s and he says, I shouldn’t be subject to anti-miscegenation laws that will invalidate my ability to naturalize by marrying an American citizen and the court says it’s 1950s and we just decided Brown versus the Board of Education and we’re facing all kinds of resistance and Brown must stand and we don’t want anything to disrupt the integration of schools under Brown versus the Board and so they basically don’t take the case. They decide it’s too difficult at that moment politically. In the words of one of the justices, one bombshell at a time is enough.

Nathan: Now in the case of Brown versus the Board of Education, you have the movement towards massive resistance that emerges in response, that tries to fight back against desegregation measures and then there are multiple decades of pushback with people joining private clubs, opting out of certain public schools. In the Loving case, I’m curious, is there any kind of social or political reverberation that comes in the wake of this landmark ruling and is there a way to track what kinds of changes the Loving decision really helped to make permanent in American society?

Rachel: Well I think the first thing that really strikes people about Loving is that when the first interracial couple went to marry in Virginia, they did so without incident. It was very peaceful. There really was no massive resistance of the type that you’re describing after Brown and you might ask yourself why is that? And I think part of it is that there was no feeling that people were being forced to integrate. Marriage remained a free choice and so it was almost a laissez-faire approach. We won’t interfere but we won’t make you get married across racial lines and so probably if you saw any kind of reaction it happened more informally after you were married. You were trying to find a place to live where you could be accepted or you were walking down the street and people thought you were very unusual. So there were undoubtedly social pressures that both deterred people from intermarrying and effected the experience of intermarriage but it wasn’t happening because of formal restrictions and behavior by the registrars anymore.

Nathan: So, mind if I ask you a personal question?

Rachel: Sure.

Nathan: So, I’m actually part of a family that could be described as interracial, going way back to the 19th century, in fact. The historian Martha Hodes actually writes about one of my fore bearers, an interracial relationship between the Caribbean and New England and I gather that you similarly have that background of a kind of mix of these groups that are considered to be partly of different racial groups. It certainly impacted my research in ways that I didn’t always expect, and I’m curious if you had any relationship between your own biography and the research questions that drove what you then turned to study in this case?

Rachel: That is right. My father was Irish, my mother is of Mexican origin and they married in the early 1950s at a time when I think the relationship bordered on anti-miscegenation and when they were getting ready to marry, the minister said what about the children? Because the assumption was we wouldn’t really fit in anywhere and I think, throughout my life, because of my parents’ marriage, I did see issues of race and ethnicity playing out very differently than I might have if I’d been in a sort of household that was a conventional household where people had married within their own race and ethnicity. My mother also had grown up in Mexico and so I had a sort of transnational quality as well and writing the book, I think, became a vehicle for figuring out the deeper meaning of things that I had seen and I think I went from the narratives to trying to get a deeper meaning. A kind of way of understanding the world through broadening my awareness that other groups had been effected, there had been an entire history. It wasn’t just about my family and growing up in my family.

Nathan: Rachel Moran is a law professor and Dean Emeritta at the UCLA School of Law. She’s also the author of the book, Interracial Intimacy: the Regulation of Race and Romance.

Lady Lovers

The 1920’s have become synonymous with prohibition, flappers, and economic prosperity. But the decade also marked the emergence of the first queer black community networks. Nathan talks with historian Cookie Woolner about how African American blues singers like Ethel Waters and “Ma” Rainey were able to express a queer identity to mainstream audiences.

Music:

This Night by Marshall Usinger

African American culture; LGBTQ rights; lesbians; queer identity

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne: After World War 1, waves of African Americans migrated to the North, seeking economic opportunity and a reprieve from Southern racial violence. Called the Great Migration, this mass exodus brought an influx of young and single African Americans into major cities like Chicago and New York.

Nathan: Crowded together in boarding houses to afford rent, African American migrants often occupied single sex spaces. This was intended to limited promiscuity and prevent prostitution but in reality, it allowed same sex relationships to flourish, creating the first queer black community networks in the process.

Brian: At about the same time, the advent of the blues took the entertainment industry by storm. As this new music genre gained popularity, female singers, like Ethel Waters or Gertrude Ma Rainey, now had an outlet to express a queer black identity to mass audiences.

Nathan: But as historian Cookie Woolner explains, changing notions of gender and sexuality in the 1920s made some feel uneasy about what they considered to be the new sex problem.

Cookie: So we really think of the early 20th century as when kind of this idea of gay or lesbian identity is beginning to solidify. Before that people, were familiar with the notion often of same sex sex although sometimes between women this was not really even an occurrence yet but it wasn’t seen as something that kind of was a featured part of one’s identity. We didn’t really talk about having a sexuality or a sexual orientation yet but by the 1920s, this ideas beginning to solidify and especially in the black press we’re beginning to see a lot of articles talking about lady lovers. By 1929 we’re seeing articles about lesbians, unusual types of women for example so this is kind of becoming these new identity categories that people are learning about and they’re also seen as identities that are specifically flourishing in the North in cities like New York and Chicago and so people are starting to wonder if this is kind of a new sex problem, as one article refers to it in 1920.

Nathan: What about the cultural landscape where all of this is playing out? I have to imagine, when you think about the great migration and certainly the urban North in places like Chicago and New York, you have things like Jazz music or the Blues. How would we describe, say, race records, you know, the idea of black music really being mass produced and how that impacted the possibility of celebrating or even talking about same sex behavior?

Cookie: The Blues record, the Blues industry, the entertainment industry serve as really important meeting places and new cultural representations of queer identity and specifically queer black identity. We have singers such as Gertrude Ma Rainey as she is known, who are singing very explicitly queer songs. By the late 1920s we have prohibition era performers such as Gladys Bentley who are doing drag performances and flirting with the women in her audiences at this time and it’s really also significant that the race records industry is creating jobs and work opportunities for thousands of black women who, again, had often limited opportunities outside of domestic work or if they were college educated being a teacher so having the opportunity to go on these touring vaudeville circuits to perform in cabarets and theaters in the North and South is really opening up the world for thousands of women who are then going on to kind of decimate these queer representations throughout the country and kind of serve as role models of women living a very modern new life.

Nathan: One of the most famous performers in this period was a woman named Ethel Waters. Tell me about her.

Cookie: Yeah, so Ethel Waters is definitely considered one of the most successful, popular black celebrities of the 1920s. She was actually born in Philadelphia and she first became well known singing in cabarets in Harlem in the early 1920s and she was tall, she was lean, her first nickname was Mama String Bean. She was seen as more sophisticated than some of the other Blues singers, especially ones who came from the Deep South.

Cookie: But Ethel Waters was seen as very sophisticated, so much so that she was signed to Black Swan which was one of the only African American owned record companies of that time and they wanted to kind of put forth more respectable, high-culture representations of African Americans which was also very symptomatic of the larger Harlem Renaissance going on at that time as well, this kind of reach towards high culture to kind of show a different representation of African Americans than they assumed many whites were familiar with.

Nathan: And she also had a same sex relationship during this time, yes?

Cookie: Yes, so she had a partner whose name was also Ethel so they were known as the two Ethels. Her name was Ethel Williams and she was a very successful dancer at this time. She was a chorus girl in some of the early black musicals on Broadway and she had her own success as well as a dancer and the two of them went on tour together while Ethel Waters was recording for Black Swan and of course this was something that the men who owned the record company wanted to kind of keep under wraps so when they wrote promotion materials about Ethel going on tour, they would just mention that she was touring with her maid but they very much wanted to present her as heterosexual and single and very desirable to men.

Nathan: When Ethel was performing her music, I’m assuming she had certain strategies for maybe providing hidden transcripts or hidden meanings in her songs.

Cookie: So one strategy that the two Ethels had for kind of referring to their relationship in public was since they were both romantic partners as well as performance partners, one would go out on stage at the beginning of the show and say where’s my partner? Where’s that Ethel? And spend all this time going around looking for her and in a comedic fashion and this was one was that the two women were able to kind of refer to their relationship out in public. It’s kind of an open secret. Many queer relationships were considered to be an open secret at this time, something some people knew about but didn’t really talk about since it still wasn’t really acceptable in society so by being able to kind of use this type of terminology and these type of strategies, they’re able to, in some ways, kind of refer to or appeal to the queer people in their audience and let them know that they’re kind of part of their community and there’s other people here like them whereas something else like that will kind of go over the heads of the straight people who won’t be offended and won’t really know what’s going on.

Nathan: And at the same time, some artists actually ventured more overt allusions to same sex desire. Can you talk about Ma Rainey and her song Prove it on me Blues?

Cookie: Yeah, so Ma Rainey writes one of the most explicitly queer songs of this time period but again, even the title kind of hints at the fact that she can’t yet really fully outright claim a lesbian identity at this time. That’s not really possible yet so the song is entitled Prove it on me Blues and all the lyrics are kind of teasing the audience by kind of suggesting a queer identity or a masculine presentation but then kind of saying you can’t prove it on me, you didn’t see anything. So for example, in the lyrics she says went out last night, had a great big fight. Everything seemed to go on wrong. I looked up, to my surprise, the gal I was with was gone.

Cookie: But then she goes on to say, nobody caught me. You can’t prove it on me. She even then says that she was out with a crowd of her friends and they must have been women because she doesn’t like men but again, you know, you can’t, you didn’t actually catch her with a woman so you can’t prove it on her. So this type of kind of teasing the audience was one of the strategies she had at this time and it’s also significant that we don’t actually know of any woman she had a serious romantic relationship with. We have different rumors around her flirting with women, even one scandalous rumor about her taking part in a same sex orgy but we don’t really have specific evidence of women she had relationships with so if that was the case, she was in a better position to kind of broach the subject than someone such as Ethel Waters who actually did have relationships with women and didn’t brag about it in song.

Nathan: Right. Now one of the classic tensions, obviously, of artists who are trying to commercialize their talents is selling to a mass audience. So here you have artists who are using hidden and overt allusions around questions of sexuality, particularly black women’s sexuality, and at the same time you have record companies that are having to market these musicians and these artists to a largely heteronormative audience. How can they pull it off?

Cookie: Well, Ma Rainey, she recorded on Paramount Records which, like many of these race record companies as they were known, was a white owned company and they seemed to be interested in putting forth the kind of tantalizing, titillating representation of her, again in order to sell records and so we have an ad that runs for this record that’s printed in the Chicago Defender in 1928 and in the image Ma Rainey isn’t dressed up in the usual more feminine clothes that she usually wore, she usually, like many of the classic Blues women wore a lot of feathers, jewels, very kind of ostentatiously feminine clothing, but in this image she’s wearing a man’s fedora, and a blazer, and a vest and a tie so basically menswear from the waist up and she’s featured on a street corner with a couple other women in similar clothing and then, in the ad, there’s a policeman waving his baton behind them and then the text of the ad even kind of points to this and says something to the matter of what’s Ma Rainey up to? Look at that policeman, what’s going on in this scenario? And then of course the hook is, to find out, you have to buy the record. So they’re kind of taking advantage of this new interest in lesbian visibility and women’s masculine clothing fashions at this time that kind of goes along with the flapper image.

Cookie: This kind of image of a new socially liberated woman, regardless of her sexual orientation. So they’re kind of using this imagery and also kind of hinting at the illicitness of this with the policeman in order to get people to buy the record so they seem to be happy to be kind of cashing in on these ideas, these new ideas around queer sexuality.

Nathan: How would you describe the role of the black press in popularizing music that is basically being queered at this time?

Cookie: I think the black press is playing a role at this time by making images and songs about queer African Americans more visible by printing these ads, by running various gossip columns that are kind of talking about the goings on of different figures within queer Harlem at this time, and then of course there are some people who are talking about this who are concerned about the future of the race, about the potential of race suicide if there’s more queer relationships, women aren’t getting married and having children, but oftentimes it’s kind of through talking about queer behaviors and these new queer subcultures in a negative light, that they’re actually serving to bring visibility to them every time they mention the name and address of a club where one of these performers is going to appear at, right there. They’re decimating this information to interested readers who are learning about these new subcultures from the black press.

Nathan: In thinking about the development of these musical forms and the Great Migration and the importance of queer networks in advancing both of these processes, how have we changed what we think we know about LGBTQ history in America more generally?

Cookie: I think it shows that queer African Americans have played a really significant role in creating the queer subcultures of the urban North due to the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the new negro movement that was going on in the 1920s and 30s. They really played a formative role in creating these new ways of life that we see as not necessarily as tied to nuclear family or kind of expectations of reproduction, these kind of, especially for women the idea of being able to be more autonomous and make a life without a man. I think we’re seeing a lot of really important examples coming out of these Blues singers of the 1920s who are putting forth ideas around being proud of your sexuality in a very bold way at a time that no other white performers are really kind of talking about these issues of gender and sexuality.

Nathan: Cookie Woolner is a professor of history at the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book is entitled, The Famous Lady Lovers: African American Women and Same Sex Desire before Stonewall.

Another Elopement of the Familiar Sort

During the Gilded Age, elite families were in the grips of a moral panic. Wealthy heiresses were abandoning their inheritances and running off with their family’s coachmen – who, although young and handsome, were of exceedingly lower status. Historian Carolee Klimchock explains how these elopement scandals became a national sensation.

Music:

Down and Around by Podington Bear

Gilded Age; morality; social status; wealth

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian: In the late 19th century, elite families from the United States were in the grips of a moral panic. Daughters from the upper classes were abandoning their inheritances and running away with their families’ coachmen. One after the other, these scandalous stories were featured in newspapers around the country.

Brian: An heiress elopes with the family coachman. A mysterious romance with apparently no love in it. Wealthy New Yorker seeks in vain to locate his young and beautiful daughter. A strange infatuation, a beautiful maiden runs off and marries a negro coachman. Eloping couple are chased my motorcar. Clergyman’s daughter runs off with coachman but is captured by parent. The coachman again, another elopement of the familiar sort.

Carolee: It was called an epidemic. People called it a sensation. Some people even called the coachmen the personage of the era.

Brian: That’s scholar Carolee Klimchock. I spoke with her at the Organization of American Historians Conference last year. She says these elopement scandals were a result of new conceptions of love an marriage in the gilded age.

Carolee: He appeared in songs and jokes and cartoons because so many wealthy women were running off with their paid coach drivers and it was usually a live in coach driver so someone they had gotten to know over time and they were even hired for their looks. They wanted to have people who had chiseled good looks, who had good bodies, good physiques, because people wanted to show up to a party and be known to sort of have this coachman that appeared beautiful and represented them well. It was all about surfaces in the gilded age.

Brian: You could say it’s kind of a trophy servant.

Carolee: Absolutely. Many of the coach drivers were African American but then it became more trendy to have European coachmen. I think the accent became trendy, the fact that they were sort of imported and could play the part of a British servant.

Brian: It is perfectly clear in families where there are daughters to marry, that the present style of coachmen is a mistake. He is too fascinating. His horse sense is too magnetic. He must be reformed. Now, how is this to be done? It is the swell thing to have a handsome coachman with sweet whiskers and an [inaudible 00:37:13] cut. Old and bald headed coachmen would inevitably lower the tone of the family and automaton horse engineer must be invented. An equine apollo on wheels. This coachman might be wound up, like a clock and so constructed that if any young lady attempted to run off with him, he would explode or bolt to Canada.

Brian: So let’s talk a little bit about this group of women first. Presumably there’s not like Avis, rent a coachman for the night to look good. You presumably have to have a lot of money to coachman.

Carolee: A lot of money ’cause these were, usually they had full-time, not only the coachmen but they had a whole staff to take care of the horses, they had many carriages, so these were extremely wealthy people usually. They were well educated, a lot of them had gone to women’s colleges and had new ideas about modernity. They were budding suffragettes perhaps. These women were reading novels that were romantic novels that were often considered to be sort of taboo and so people were getting some new ideas about what marriage should mean, that it wasn’t necessarily a partnership among families and businesses, that there was a new idea that romance could be involved. That they were not passive sexual actors but they could have more of an active role in their personal lives.

Speaker 10: I know it’s hard for you but as you know, the LORD will guide us. And you be careful about telephoning and don’t come again ’till I tell you. I’m doing my best and try to keep up. My papa said about running off he would put me in jail and then take the children so all will go for the best. Goodnight and be good until I have you for good. You promised if I would leave him you would be true and wait for me and now is the time to show how much you care. I will never care for anyone but you and you know it. Only we must take our time and do it just right.

Brian: If you were to generalize about the coachmen, what else could you say about them as a group?

Carolee: I’ve got to imagine that they were very bold and almost fearless because they knew that there was danger. I mean, sometimes the men were threatened with violence, sometimes the men were African American and they were threatened with lynching. There was a lot of fear and outrage, and threats. It’s a story of love overcoming adversity in some ways.

Brian: How many instances of this do you think there were in a 20 or 30 year period?

Carolee: I found about 70 or so-

Brian: Wow.

Carolee: But I imagine there must be more, obviously, that I couldn’t find and that these families often tried to keep them out of the newspapers so.

Brian: Yes, nondisclosure acts.

Carolee: Absolutely. There’s one case of this woman Ella Tice in New York and she was interviewed by the New York times saying I’m the happiest woman in Westchester County. You can tell all your readers. He, you know, also said I love this woman, she loves me. It’s nobody’s business but our own so it was really interesting to see people not running away and hiding a lot of them were owning it and that particular couple had to leave town. Her own brother threatened her life.

Brian: Never was the peaceful village of Williamsbridge Westchester County so stirred to its depths as is now the case over the wedding of pretty Ella Tice to the colored coachman James Randolph. And never were the good people of the Baptist Church more deeply agitated than over the announcement made by Mrs. Randolph herself in the Herald that her husband and herself, regardless of what anybody might think, would walk boldly up the main aisle at the service yesterday evening and take their places as if nothing had happened. If that darky dares to show his face in the Baptist Church tonight, exclaimed one hotheaded youth, there are men in this place who would just as soon, and little sooner, give him a coat of tar and feathers.

Carolee: Nancy Carnegie’s also an interesting one and an unusual one in the sense that Andrew Carnegie himself sort of sanctioned the relationship.

Brian: What was the relationship to Andrew Carnegie?

Carolee: She was his niece, apparently his favorite niece, and she ran off with her coachman who was also her riding instructor. The mother disowned her and was very upset about it but Andrew Carnegie himself had said well I came from nothing and I respect this man. He doesn’t drink, that was always often a thing and he said this is better than if she were to marry a worthless duke. That’s an unusual case but it’s one that stands out because it’s so high profile.

Carolee: Victoria Moricini’s another interesting character. Her father worked for J. Gould.

Brian: This is the railroad magnate?

Carolee: Yes.

Brian: Much hated by large sectors of the upper-class, not to mention working people.

Carolee: Yes. When she eloped with her coachman, he sent Pinkerton detectives to try to find them and try to arrest her for so called stealing some jewelry that was her jewelry but since the parents had bought it it was sort of like a thievery.

Brian: My Victoria was the light of this home, the delight of her mother, the very pride of my life, and she has disgraced us all. My God, if I could put my hands on that villain I would tear him to pieces. Oh sir, you do not know how happy we were. I gave her $200 a month, horses, diamonds, anything she wanted. I supposed she would marry but I did not think my beautiful Victoria would marry a dirty stableman who washed his clothes in a horse trough.

Carolee: And they escaped the Pinkerton detectives but that was actually something that other families did too, they sent detectives out to try to find some way to rustle the woman back or send her to an insane alyssum, that was another thing that commonly happened but Victoria in that case, she went to New York City, of course, which a lot of people did where it was a little bit easier to live across class or interracial relationship. She became a Vaudeville singer and dancer and she apparently, according to reviews anyway, did not have the best singing voice but she got great crowds because she was this wealthy woman who ran off with her coach driver and the coach driver would often walk her up to the stage so they sort of reenacted their relationship for a paying audience.

Brian: She has grown somewhat stouter since the days when she danced in tights with mandolin and song at the casino while her German husband made $2 a day as a sixth avenue conductor. Her hair, the glimpse of it one can see behind her black veil, is still brilliant and without a trace of age or grief. She is an enigma and she will so remain unless she chooses to surrender her secret.

Brian: Okay so you’re trained in American studies, we pay you the big bucks to explain why things like this happen, what’s going on?

Carolee: You know I think there was a lot of intimacy between these people that sort of leveled their relationship in a way and sort of leveled their almost class position. Women were, of course, lower in status than their male counterparts.

Brian: And what about close proximity in an intimate space?

Carolee: Yes, they both had closed carriages as well as open carriages so you would have a conversation and the coachman would often help the people into the carriage, they would take their goods if they went shopping, so they had a lot of personal interactions and there was also the coaching hour which was 5:00 PM in Central Park so for New Yorkers, going coaching and being seen in your fancy coaching clothes, coaching dresses, coaching hats…

Brian: The coaching hour.

Carolee: Yes. So it was during the coaching hour the coachmen and the heiress spent a lot of time together sort of seeing and being seen so there was a lot of genuine intimacy that grew between them because of this proximity.

Brian: And do you think it’s possible that because of that there was more natural, what we call honest conversation than some of these women would have with their fiances or their whatever you call them back them dates, I don’t know.

Carolee: Yes, and if they had gone on a date it would have been chaperoned. The parents never thought the coachmen would be a threat so they could travel alone, they could go horseback riding alone in a park or in the woods.

Brian: The coachmen, so, was supposed to be a chaperone of sorts?

Carolee: Yes, yes, definitely.

Brian: This is also an era in which photography, which has been around for a while, really begins to make its way into the newspapers.

Carolee: Absolutely.

Brian: Did that play a role in your story at all?

Carolee: Well coaching becomes a huge aspect of newspaper layouts and so coaching scenes, coaching parades that happened, and as I mentioned the coaching hour in Central Park, what the coachmen looked like, and what women looked like in their coaching gear was a big part of sort of the gilded aristocracy and so the average person couldn’t go to a debutant ball or something like that or go to Del Monicos and the fancy restaurant but they could see people in their carriages, in their fancy gear so this was like reading US magazine. You were seeing the celebrities in view here.

Brian: Carolee Klimchock is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her forthcoming book is titled, Aris Wade’s Coachman: Scandals in 19th Century America.

Joanne: That’s it for us today but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian: Funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and BackStory change the narrative of race and representation.

Nathan: BackStory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost office at the University of Virginia, the Johns Hopkins University, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 11: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.